War Gameshttp://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck
[Please go to 'Settings' to change your Tagline]Wed, 05 Mar 2014 22:26:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.27 Reasons Why America Will Never Go To War Over Ukrainehttp://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/03/05/7-reasons-why-america-will-never-go-to-war-over-ukraine/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/03/05/7-reasons-why-america-will-never-go-to-war-over-ukraine/#commentsWed, 05 Mar 2014 22:08:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck/?p=1782America is the mightiest military power in the world. And that fact means absolutely nothing for the Ukraine crisis. Regardless of whether Russia continues to occupy the Crimea region of Ukraine, or decides to occupy all of Ukraine, the U.S. is not going to get into a shooting war with Russia.

This has nothing to do with whether Obama is strong or weak. Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan would face the same constraints. The U.S. may threaten to impose economic sanctions, but here is why America will never smack Russia with a big stick:

Russia is a nuclear superpower. Russia has an estimated 4,500 active nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Unlike North Korea or perhaps Iran, whose nuclear arsenals couldn’t inflict substantial damage, Russia could totally devastate the U.S. as well as the rest of the planet. U.S. missile defenses, assuming they even work, are not designed to stop a massive Russian strike.

For the 46 years of the Cold War, America and Russia were deadly rivals. But they never fought. Their proxies fought: Koreans, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Israelis and Arabs. The one time that U.S. and Soviet forces almost went to war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Neither Obama nor Putin is crazy enough to want to repeat that.

U.S. Marine Corps vehicle during amphibious assault exercise.

Russia has a powerful army. While the Russian military is a shadow of its Soviet glory days, it is still a formidable force. The Russian army has about 300,000 men and 2,500 tanks (with another 18,000 tanks in storage), according to the “Military Balance 2014″ from the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Its air force has almost 1,400 aircraft, and its navy 171 ships, including 25 in the Black Sea Fleet off Ukraine’s coast.

U.S. forces are more capable than Russian forces, which did not perform impressively during the 2008 Russo-Georgia War. American troops would enjoy better training, communications, drones, sensors and possibly better weapons (though the latest Russian fighter jets, such as the T-50, could be trouble for U.S. pilots). However, better is not good enough. The Russian military is not composed of lightly armed insurgents like the Taliban, or a hapless army like the Iraqis in 2003. With advanced weapons like T-80 tanks, supersonic AT-15 Springer anti-tank missiles, BM-30 Smerch multiple rocket launchers and S-400 Growler anti-aircraft missiles, Russian forces pack enough firepower to inflict significant American losses.

Ukraine is closer to Russia. The distance between Kiev and Moscow is 500 miles. The distance between Kiev and New York is 5,000 miles. It’s much easier for Russia to send troops and supplies by land than for the U.S. to send them by sea or air.

The U.S. military is tired. After nearly 13 years of war, America’s armed forces need a breather. Equipment is worn out from long service in Iraq and Afghanistan, personnel are worn out from repeated deployments overseas, and there are still about 40,000 troops still fighting in Afghanistan.

The U.S. doesn’t have many troops to send. The U.S. could easily dispatch air power to Ukraine if its NATO allies allow use of their airbases, and the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush and its hundred aircraft are patrolling the Mediterranean. But for a ground war to liberate Crimea or defend Ukraine, there is just the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy, the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit sailing off Spain, the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in Germany and the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

While the paratroopers could drop into the combat zone, the Marines would have sail past Russian defenses in the Black Sea, and the Stryker brigade would probably have to travel overland through Poland into Ukraine. Otherwise, bringing in mechanized combat brigades from the U.S. would be logistically difficult, and more important, could take months to organize.

The American people are tired. Pity the poor politician who tries to sell the American public on yet another war, especially some complex conflict in a distant Eastern Europe nation. Neville Chamberlain’s words during the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis come to mind: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

America‘s allies are tired. NATO sent troops to support the American campaign in Afghanistan, and has little to show for it. Britain sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and has little to show for it. It is almost inconceivable to imagine the Western European public marching in the streets to demand the liberation of Crimea, especially considering the region’s sputtering economy, which might be snuffed out should Russia stop exporting natural gas. As for military capabilities, the Europeans couldn’t evict Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi without American help. And Germans fighting Russians again? Let’s not even go there.

This doesn’t mean that war is impossible. If Russia invades the Baltic States to “protect” their ethnic Russian minorities, the guns could indeed roar. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are NATO members. What would Ronald Reagan have done if the Soviets had invaded West Germany? Barack Obama would face more or less the same question in a Baltic crisis, or if a Ukraine conflict spills over into fellow NATO member Poland.

However, talk of using military force against Russia over Ukraine is just talk. It will stay that way.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/03/05/7-reasons-why-america-will-never-go-to-war-over-ukraine/feed/40Sarah Palin Was Right About Ukraine?http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/03/03/sarah-palin-was-right-about-ukraine/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/03/03/sarah-palin-was-right-about-ukraine/#commentsTue, 04 Mar 2014 03:55:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck/?p=1652Sarah Palin may not have been able to see Russia from her house, but she might have been right about Russia invading Ukraine.

“After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next,” Palin claimed in 2008, during her vice-presidential bid alongside John McCain.

Palin, already mocked for claiming that she could see Russia from Alaska, was criticized for her Ukraine prediction. Among the critics was Foreign Policy Magazine, which described her forecast as “strange” and an “an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

Palin hasn’t exactly tried to hide her glee. “Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” she crowed on her Facebook page. “I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine. Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008.”

Foreign Policy Magazine (whom I also write for) was gracious enough to offer a sort of mea culpa. “So we have to hand it to her: Six years after the publication of a 156-word blog post, points to Palin. Sort of.”

The magazine then pointed out that given Palin’s lack of foreign affairs credentials, it was less likely that Palin astutely predicted Russia grabbing Crimea, and more likely that her comment came “in the context of the GOP’s 2008 narrative, which was the same as most Republican campaigns since World War II: Democrats are weak on national defense and that weakness will invite aggression, endangering us all.”

Regardless of whether Palin had ESP or was just a broken clock that happened to tell the correct time, postulating that a forceful U.S. response to Russia during the brief 2008 Russia-Georgia War would have deterred Moscow from attacking Ukraine today, is as unlikely a scenario as imagining that then-Senator Obama could have changed U.S. policy.

In 2008, the U.S. military was stretched like a rubber band, trying to fight simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. George W. Bush’s White House, which could hardly be described as shy about using force, didn’t have the resources for another conflict, and every U.S. President – Republican or Democrat – has trod very carefully in any situation that might put American troops in a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia. The Bush administration did ship humanitarian aid to Georgia, Western Europe criticized Russia, and that was all. Jimmy Carter ordered the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Russian troops stayed in that country another 10 years.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the Russia-Georgia conflict was that it is dangerous for Russia’s smaller neighbors to think of joining NATO, as Georgia hoped to do, which Ukraine has flirted with, and which the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have actually done. Regardless of what Senator Obama said in 2008 or President Obama did today, Russia would protect what it perceives as its vital interests.

DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the cutting-edge Pentagon research organization whose ancestor ARPA helped develop the Internet back in 1969. Now, DARPA has launched a new project, called Memex, to create a better way of searching the Web.

DARPA says the problem with current Web search techniques is that searches must be manually entered one at a time, search sessions aren’t saved, search results are not organized, and the Deep Web – the part not covered by commercial search engines like Google – is not mined.

DARPA wants to create a better way. “We’re envisioning a new paradigm for search that would tailor indexed content, search results and interface tools to individual users and specific subject areas, and not the other way around,” said Memex program manager Chris White in a DARPA news release. “By inventing better methods for interacting with and sharing information, we want to improve search for everybody and individualize access to information. Ease of use for non-programmers is essential.”

Memex will use open-source architecture to focus on three areas: domain-specific indexing, domain-specific search, and various applications for the Department of Defense. And in a nod to public fears about government spying, DARPA makes clear that it is not interested in proposals for “attributing anonymous services, deanonymizing or attributing identity to servers or IP addresses, or accessing information not intended to be publicly available.”

More details can be found here. But what’s particularly interesting is that DARPA wants a search engine that can be used by commercial as well as government users. In other words, something that you and I can use.

Not that DARPA is doing this to help people find hotter porn or cuter cat videos. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies are overloaded with vast amounts of information gathered by everything from NSA eavesdropping, to video imagery from surveillance drones, to monitoring Chinese and Iranian Web sites. Huge quantities of information, obtained at great expense and sometimes questionable legality, are in digital limbo because there are not enough human analysts to sift through it all. Software that can sift through mounds of data to answer a search engine query is at the top of the government’s to-do list.

Memex, by the way, get its name from a device called Memex (short for “memory index” or “memory extender”), a proto-Internet proposed in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II.

Will the modern Memex produce a new Google? It’s hard to predict. DARPA is the kind of blue-sky research organization whose ideas sometimes work or sometimes don’t. But it’s possible that one day, instead of “googling”, we’ll be “memexing”.

There is no such thing as “friendly” fire when you’re the one being shot at, goes the old joke. But it wasn’t funny to some U.S. Army riflemen who were accidentally bombed by U.S. planes in Afghanistan.

This video shows what happens when a 500-pound bomb was dropped on a U.S. Army outpost instead of the Taliban. The incident began with American 60-millimeter mortar team bombarding Taliban positions on a distant ridge, according to video posted by the funker530 veterans site.

In the video, U.S. troops on a hilltop seem to be watching the mortar bombardment (you can see what looks like smoke from the mortar shells to the left). “Weapons away,” says a voice on the radio, followed by the roar of jet engines overhead. Then there is a loud explosion next to the outpost.

“What the f-ck!”, shouts an American soldier.

“Where did it hit?” asks a voice on the radio.

“About a half second before impact you could hear the bomb screaming in like I hadn’t ever heard before, and I definitely knew at that point something was off,” one of the infantrymen later told Funkers530.

The shaken soldiers take deep breaths as they realize that no one had been seriously injured. Then one of them points to a nearby shack that had been smashed by the bomb blast.

It’s not absolutely certain that an American aircraft was responsible, though the voices on the radio sound American, and jets providing close air support for U.S. troops probably are. There has been no explanation for the accident.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/21/fire-isnt-friendly-when-u-s-jets-bomb-american-troops/feed/0Iran Sends ‘Fleet’ To U.S. East Coast On Comic Relief Missionhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/10/iranian-navy-sends-fleet-to-u-s-east-coast-for-comic-relief/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/10/iranian-navy-sends-fleet-to-u-s-east-coast-for-comic-relief/#commentsMon, 10 Feb 2014 19:10:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck/?p=1615Don’t fear the Iranian “fleet” that is sailing toward the U.S. East Coast. You have more to fear from your bathtub boats than from this ostensible armada.

Admiral Haddad pointedly added that “Iran’s military fleet is approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message.”

Unfortunately, Iran’s gunboat diplomacy may send the opposite message, namely highlighting just how feeble is the gunboat part. Haddad speaks of the “Iranian Army’s naval fleets”, which not only sounds like a peculiar oxymoron coming from an admiral of the Navy (which presumably is a separate branch from the Army), but also raises the question of what “fleets” he’s talking about. The expeditionary force appears to be the Iranian Navy’s 29th Fleet, which consists of a whopping two ships; the destroyer Sabalan and the helicopter carrier Kharg, which left the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas on January 22 for the Atlantic Ocean, according to Iran’s Press TV.

Iranian warship Sabalan. Wikipedia photo

But the Sabalan is a relatively small 45-year-old British-built frigate armed with just four Chinese-made anti-ship missiles and a single big 4.5-inch caliber gun. The ship made history after it was bombed and nearly sunk by U.S. Navy A-6 aircraft in April 1988 after it fired on American planes that were retaliating for Iranian minefields laid in the Persian Gulf (the Sabalan’s captain was nicknamed “Captain Nasty” for his attacks on neutral merchant ships). The 37-year-old “helicopter carrier” Kharg carries just three helicopters, notes the War is Boring blog ; it’s actually a tanker and replenishment ship to refuel Iranian warships.

These vessels will obviously be closely monitored by the U.S. Navy, though the U.S. Coast Guard could probably take them out should hostilities flare. Of course, this assumes that the Iranian duo will make it to the East Coast in the first place. The Iranian military has suffered decades of sanctions that have impeded the flow of spare parts. Bandar Abbas is about 6,000 miles from New York, which leaves plenty of empty ocean for two old and maintenance-deprived ships to break down. Perhaps some passing American warships will offer them a tow?

What’s funny is that I wrote virtually the same story more than two years ago. The Iranian armada never materialized then, and who knows if it will now? But if it does, what purpose does this expedition serve? If Iran means to intimidate or deter the U.S from, say, bombing its nuclear facilities, then it can best do so by threatening to either block oil tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf, or unleash terror attacks by Hezbollah. A couple of decrepit ships off Boston harbor won’t cause more than a chuckle.

In the meantime, considering what happened the last time the Sabalan fired on American forces, Captain Nasty is advised to be on his best behavior.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/10/iranian-navy-sends-fleet-to-u-s-east-coast-for-comic-relief/feed/19Taliban Show Video Of Captured U.S. War Doghttp://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/06/taliban-show-video-of-captured-u-s-war-dog/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/06/taliban-show-video-of-captured-u-s-war-dog/#commentsThu, 06 Feb 2014 17:42:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck/?p=1608Pity the poor pooch caught by the Taliban, who have released a video of what they claim is a captured U.S. military dog named “Colonel”.

The video appeared on the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” Web site. A related Twitter account said that the dog was captured after a December 23rd firefight that allegedly killed 6 U.S. soldiers. “Two Mujahideen suffered injuries during the firefight but their condition was stated to be stable,” said the Taliban. “Mujahideen seized US Dog, 2 automatic machine guns, night vision goggles or night vision binocular, a semiautomatic US pistol, ammunition vests and a number of bullet holders.”

“Colonel”, if that indeed his name, is shown on a leash held by Taliban fighters. I can’t identify the breed, but the Guardian newspaper cites a military dog handler in Afghanistan who identifies it as a Belgian shepherd, a breed commonly used by troops in Afghanistan.

The dog doesn’t appear mistreated but he does seem apprehensive, which he can’t blamed for given that Afghans and other Muslims consider dogs unclean. The Taliban may also not feel much affection for dogs that that are frequently employed by U.S. and other troops to sniff out buried IEDs and narcotics.

I suspect that “Colonel” will not be mistreated. The Taliban have become too adept at public relations to create an animal rights martyr. Perhaps he will be released as a humanitarian (canine-itarian?) gesture.

Humans have used dogs in wartime for millennia (but not cats, who are too smart to get drafted). The U.S. military made extensive use of dogs in Vietnam, and the fate of those traumatized dogs when or if they returned home was not a happy one. The canine warriors of today’s Afghan and Iraq wars have an easier homecoming, with many organizations working to see them adopted.

But the sad part is that while there is a vast body of international law regarding treatment of humans, there are none for animals. The Laws of War prohibit torture, rape and wanton destruction of property, with dogs and other animals being considered “property”. But there doesn’t appear to be any legal protection for animals in a conflict in the sense of animal rights. “Laws and customs of war are about people and property,” said Michael Newton, an expert on the laws of war at Vanderbilt University Law School, in an email. “Though you might extend that by analogy to military working dogs, as U.S. property.”

Even though humans are frequently forced to fight in wars against their will, as in the draft, people always enjoy some degree of choice and the ability to determine their fate. Animals aren’t so lucky.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/02/06/taliban-show-video-of-captured-u-s-war-dog/feed/4Predator Drone Sends North Dakota Man to Jailhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/27/predator-drone-sends-north-dakota-man-to-jail/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/27/predator-drone-sends-north-dakota-man-to-jail/#commentsTue, 28 Jan 2014 00:27:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck/?p=1578What do you say to a drone that makes an arrest?

“Book him, Predator?”

This was no joke for a North Dakota family who were arrested with the assistance of a Predator drone. Rodney Brossart was sentenced to three years in prison, of which all but six months was suspended, for a June 2011 incident in which police attempted to arrest him over his failure to return three cows from a neighboring farm that had strayed on to his property.

After Brossart was arrested, an armed standoff ensued between his three sons and a SWAT team. His sons were located by a border-surveillance Predator borrowed from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), which enabled local police to safely apprehend them, according to local newspapers.

A federal judge rejected a motion by Brossart’s attorney to dismiss the case on the ground that the drone surveillance was conducted without a warrant. On January 14, a jury found Brossart guilty of terrorizing police, though he was acquitted of theft and criminal mischief. Brossart’s sons pled guilty to charges of menacing law enforcement officers, and were sentenced to a year of probation.

Brossart won’t be the last person convicted with the help of a drone as law enforcement deploys more of them. What is worrisome is that drones designed to protect American borders are being used to conduct surveillance on Americans themselves. Records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, found that CBP Predator drones flew 700 missions between 2010 and 2012 for other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and local police departments. CBP Predators were equipped with Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER), developed by the military to detect insurgents in Afghanistan.

Yet for all the sinister mystique of drones, and the uncomfortable feeling that being shadowed by a drone might create (many people in the Middle East feel your pain), the drones themselves are not the real issue. Had a manned police helicopter with a pilot at the controls helped to apprehend Brossart, the outcome would have been the same. Indeed, the question of whether aerial surveillance requires a warrant is ambiguous, with some court rulings – including a 1986 Supreme Court decision – allowing warrantless surveillance, while other rulings have found it to be unconstitutional.

There was a time when aerial surveillance was so expensive that privacy was a minor issue. But now drones are relatively cheap and can be equipped with sophisticated sensors, so they can vacuum up large amounts of camera imagery and other data, in the same way that advances in computers and communications enable the NSA to collect huge amounts of data from telephones and the Internet. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, it is not clear what police are doing with the data.

So we could face a future where the skies are criss-crossed by police drones tracking suspected criminals, and in the process, spying on the rest of us. Which almost makes the rest of us suspected criminals.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/27/predator-drone-sends-north-dakota-man-to-jail/feed/30Israel Thwarts Al Qaeda Plot to Blow Up U.S. Embassyhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/22/israel-thwarts-al-qaeda-plot-to-blow-up-u-s-embassy/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/01/22/israel-thwarts-al-qaeda-plot-to-blow-up-u-s-embassy/#commentsWed, 22 Jan 2014 17:55:00 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelpeck/?p=1556Israel says it has thwarted an Al Qaeda plot to destroy the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv with suicide bombs.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, arrested three Palestinians on December 25th after they allegedly were recruited by Al Qaeda over the Internet, said Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The attackers planned simultaneous suicide attacks on the International Convention Center in Jerusalem and the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. One of the suspects, a truck driver named Abu Sa’ara, was supposed to borrow a truck from a friend. He would load the truck with bombs, and then provide five more terrorists with forged Russian identification papers that would allow them to enter Israel. Three of the terrorists w0uld detonate themselves at Tel Aviv’s International Convention Center, and also attempt to kill any rescue personnel who arrived after the explosion. After the explosion, Abu Sa’ara would detonate his truck, killing more bystanders and rescuers. At the same, the two remaining suicide bombers would blow themselves up at the entrance to the U.S. embassy.

“The recruiter, who identified himself only by the religious nickname Arib al-Sham (‘the outstanding one from Syria’), told them that he worked for Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over the leadership of Al-Qaeda after the Americans killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011,” Haaretz said.

U.S. embassy in Beirut,1983, after Hezbollah bombing (Wikipedia photo)

The Al Qaeda handler sent Abu Sa’ara computer files on how to build bombs, and also discussed flying him to Turkey so he could cross into Syria for training at a camp run by Al Qaeda, which has taken advantage of the Syrian civil war to establish safe bases in northern Syria.

Would the plot have worked? The U.S. Embassy in Israel is pretty well-guarded, and Israel devotes a lot of resources to security and anti-terrorism. On the other hand, I was in Jerusalem in 2011 hours after a bomb at a bus stop killed a British woman. I still remember the shrapnel embedded in a nearby telephone booth. So even Israeli security can be penetrated.

The other question is, was this a serious plot, or are Israeli authorities exaggerating the threat as governments are sometimes prone to do? We may never know for sure, but this much is clear: blowing up American embosses is an Al Qaeda specialty. On August 7, 1998, simultaneous car bomb attacks killed or wounded more than 4,000 people – mostly non-American bystanders – at the U.S embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. The bombers were affiliated with Osama Bin-Laden and Al Qaeda.

Worried that civilization is about to collapse? Do you fear invasion by zombies or aliens? Society might sink into an abyss of savagery and lawlessness, mobs might howl outside your gate, but at least you won’t run out of food thanks to this Costco emergency food stockpile for the low, low price of $3,999.99.

Apocalypse or not, how in heaven’s name could a grocery list possibly cost $4,000? The answer is 30,144 servings of freeze-dried and dehydrated food, enough to feed four people for a year, according to Costco’s description. You get 378 cans of food, divided into grains, fruits and vegetables, dairy, protein and miscellaneous. The menu includes flour, rice, elbow macaroni, broccoli, raspberries, beans, fruit drink and lots of textured vegetable protein in flavors like beef and sausage. And for extra peace of mind, your food package “arrives on a pallet that is black-wrapped for security and privacy.” So your neighbors won’t storm your house after the zombies cut off the food supply (nor will they point at your bunker and laugh).

I resemble as a gastronome as much as a Big Mac resembles Kobe beef, but the list of foods reminds me of a cross between the scrumptious emergency rations so beloved by American soldiers, and the kind of food I devoured as a college student (thankfully there are no cheap frozen burritos or hot dogs – the collapse of civilization does have some advantages).

Everyone should have some food stockpiled for an emergency such as floods and earthquakes (or zombies and aliens, if you are so inclined). But if America has been so damaged that it can’t feed its people for an entire year, one has to wonder from where will come the medicine, fuel, and spare parts that will at least make life bearable if not pleasant. Perhaps there comes a point when a disaster becomes so catastrophic that you simply can’t prepare for it.

Living on taco-flavored textured vegetable protein for a year? Thanks, but I’ll probably climb out of the bunker and turn myself over to the zombies. At least they’ll enjoy their meal.

As if the Iran-UFO connection (the Axis of Alien-ness?) couldn’t get any weirder, it now appears that the Iranian Air Force attempted to shoot down aircraft that didn’t seem very Earth-like.

Before I go any further, the following does not come from a conspiracy Web site. It’s from an article last October in Combat Aircraft Monthly, a military aviation magazine that features some well-respected writers. The article on Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighters by Babak Taghvaee, who has written extensively on the Iranian Air Force, also recounts how Iran attempted to intercept what it believed to be U.S. spy drones overflying its nuclear facilities.

What’s interesting in Taghvaee’s piece is how Iran describes the intruders, which the Iranians called “luminous objects” in the belief that they were emitting light to enable night photography:

According to Iranian sources, the CIA’s intelligence drones displayed astonishing flight characteristics, including an ability to fly outside the atmosphere, attain a maximum cruise speed of Mach 10, and a minimum speed of zero, with the ability to hover over the target. Finally, these drones used powerful ECM that could jam enemy radars using very high levels of magnetic energy, disrupting navigation systems.

In one intercept over the Arak nuclear facility in November 2004, an Iranian F-14 Tomcat tried to lock its radar on to a luminous object, only to have the radar beam disrupted. “The pilot described the object as being spherical, with something like a green afterburner creating a considerable amount of turbulence behind it,” according to the article. The intruder then increased its speed and “disappeared like a meteor.”

The tale took a deadly turn in January 2012, when an F-14 was scrambled to intercept an intruder flying towards the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Seconds after take-off, the F-14 exploded, killing both crewmen. No cause for the tragedy was determined.

This is not the first time that Iranian fighters tangled with alleged UFOs: In 1976, during the reign of the Shah before the fundamentalists took over, Iranian F-4 Phantoms unsuccessfully attempted to intercept fast, bright objects, only to have some unknown force knock out their instruments. Yet note that nowhere in Taghvaee’s article do Iranian authorities describe the luminous objects in 2004 and 2012 as UFOs (indeed, the only time the word “UFO” is used at all is in a single sub-headline). It is possible that jamming could have disrupted the dated 1970s radar of Iran’s F-14s in the 2004 incident, while an aging aircraft kept flying by parts smuggled past a Western embargo may have exploded in 2012 for reasons other than extraterrestrial action.

In that case, the question becomes, what kind of aircraft flies at Mach 10? That’s 10 times the speed of sound, or 7,612 miles per hour (the legendary SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft flew at around Mach 3, or 2,283 miles per hour). An obvious candidate is a hypersonic aircraft like NASA’s experimental X-43 hypersonic aircraft, which flew at Mach 9.68 in 2004. That program was terminated, and briefly resurrected as the Air Force X-51 Waverider, which flew at Mach 5 for nearly four minutes last May before plunging into the Pacific.

But these projects are more like experimental missiles that one day might become manned or unmanned aircraft. If the “luminous objects” described by Iran really did fly at Mach 10, jam radars and zoom away from jet interceptors, then this suggests a hypersonic aircraft mature and reliable enough to be trusted with sensitive reconnaissance missions. Perhaps the semi-mythical Aurora?

Without a lot more evidence, such as a crashed spacecraft of an alien pilot, I am not inclined to believe that UFOs felt a need to peek at Iran’s nuclear sites. It’s more likely that the Iranian military – perhaps through an honest mistake – exaggerated the performance of the intruders. But if they didn’t, and the U.S. was able to deploy Mach 10 reconnaissance aircraft a decade ago, then here’s the biggest mystery: Why is America spending a trillion dollars to develop a troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that can’t even fly Mach 2?